Viktoria Ivleva – On Syrian Refugees and Her Own Escape from Europe

Photographer-journalist Viktoria Ivleva was at the Serbia-Hungary border, where right now refugees from the Middle East are continuing to gather. She witnessed how they are greeted and wrote a message to Europeans who are worrying about future spending on social benefits for immigrants.

I’m dreaming about a war in Europe. There is no hope of it ending soon. An artillery shell hit the house where I lived my whole life; my family and I escaped alive, but everything else there was destroyed.

We decide to leave for far-off and thriving Jordan or its neighboring country, Israel – this is exactly how it goes in my dream. All of our savings are being spent on organizing this trip; we’re leaving our homeland with our possessions in small backpacks, two young children sat in strollers and two older children who are walking beside us. We make it to the edge of Europe where we find some dark-skinned people staring at us, promising to illegally transport our family by boat to Southern Turkey. The trip costs 1,250 dollars per person, children half-price. The boat, built for four passengers, now contains sixteen. Others are showing my husband how to steer the boat. We set sail on a frightening voyage in the middle of the night.

The boat begins taking on water near the Turkish coast and finally capsizes. We’re wise enough to save our children and swim for ourselves, but the backpacks and strollers sink to the bottom. I’m happy and thank God for prompting us to put our documents and money savings in waterproof bags that are hanging around our necks. Morning comes, we’re drying off on the beach when the police arrive, who are quite friendly and take us to the nearest town for free. We find and pay for a bus there that travels to the Syrian border and rides along the Syrian coast. The money is running out. Local volunteers offer blankets, water and bread, but they don’t have enough for everyone. I don’t see any large international organizations around except for Doctors Without Borders.

It’s difficult to get adjusted: neither my husband nor I know Arabic, but we know a few European languages. The children immediately fall asleep on the bus, I’m barely holding on myself. My husband cheers us up, as we’re only 250 kilometers away from crossing the border with Lebanon, then we’ll be in Israel, and after that, Jordan. We begin thinking about where is better to go when someone else on the bus gets news from other refugees who are ahead of us: Lebanon is closing its border and doesn’t want to let people cross its territory. We can’t believe it – we don’t give a damn about Lebanon, it’s just a country on the way. We can’t turn back either with Europe burning behind us. We decide to go forward.

The blood of migrants flows in each one of us, and there isn’t one single person on Earth whose ancestors, at some point, didn’t set off on some dusty road, fleeing war, plague or other disasters.

Evening is upon us, we’re near the Syria-Lebanon border. There are people from different parts of Europe all around us who are fleeing from the war. The crowd presses a wire along the border, people start yelling, some in German, some in French, some in Hungarian. In response, the Lebanese police rank is securely clamped down. I feel that I don’t have the strength to go forward, let alone go nowhere. I struggle to remember two or three words in Arabic and try to explain the situation to some woman, but she doesn’t stop to listen and instead rushes forward to film the crowd. There are more local journalists here than are necessary. It’s difficult for them to understand us – different languages, after all – but persistently jump into our lives, offering us to pose for a picture, or instead they view us with arrogance and shamelessly take pictures.

My husband goes with some other men in search of food and comes back around an hour later, saying and at once reproaching himself that they got into someone’s garden and stole some apples and corn. We take out a pot and boil corn for the children. I badly want something to drink. The children are asking to go to the bathroom but there isn’t one around; we have to take them to the closest bush and try not to smear the feces of those who were there before on us. Someone is reading a local newspaper in Arabic, where there are articles about how we’re all pigs, dirty European pigs, not cleaning up after ourselves, praying to the wrong god and not living according to correct principles. I think again about burning Europe, the impossibility of turning back, the long and tortured road we took with our children, and I cry…and then I open my eyes.

I dreamed of a story being lived every day by ordinary Syrian refugees, except my story is geographically rotated in the opposite direction. Several days ago I saw tons of families like this, clearly middle-class people, clearly not accustomed to nomadic life or to the hardships of long transitions. All of them were either sitting or lying right on the ground outside of the closed Duty Free store in the Serbian town of Khogrosh, 100 meters from the Serbia-Hungary border which was completely closed for passage by the Hungarian authorities and was even surrounded with shiny barbed wire.

I am familiar with the conventional arguments: about how there are probably ISIS fighters among these refugees, about how they aren’t really refugees but rather people who are just seeking a better life, about how they’re going to be living at the expense of us Europeans and suck our European benefits dry and, because of that, our taxes will raise by a few percentage points…

At the same time, there hasn’t been one confirmation of ISIS fighters penetrating Europe by posing as refugees, but the dead tired child, the thirsty pregnant mother and the guys who don’t want to fight in the war have nothing to prove – these people are standing in front of me. Why are we behaving so badly towards them?

The blood of migrants flows in each one of us, and there isn’t one single person on Earth whose ancestors, at some point, didn’t set off on some dusty road, fleeing war, plague or other disasters. Jesus Christ himself was also a refugee. In a similar vein, it’s even sadder to witness how many modern lapsed “Christians” have suddenly taken up shocking values. “Don’t help your neighbor! Don’t love him! Think the worst about these people! All of these people are not our brothers! Don’t treat others the way you would want to be treated…”

Well, Christian xenophobes, pray to God that you never become a refugee. Sleep tight and don’t let nightmares like this torment you. Sweet dreams.